Wednesday, September 14, 2011

My Sunday

Does anyone
else ever try to take on too much?
Early Sunday morning, I dropped Chris off at the airport for a work
trip, and returned home to sit on the rug with my coffee, Meeks, and about ten
cookbooks spread out in front of us. My plan: choose some recipes, make a
shopping list, go to the farmers market.

Then I thought,
“and when I get back, I’ll reorganize all the cabinets and fridge while doing
all the laundry. And I’ll make
some vegetable stock for the freezer. Yay!”

My eyes went to
the corner where my little butcher block island stands, happily carrying some
of the load for our bursting-at-the-seams cabinets and pantry. We sure could use one of those big,
open, industrial-looking shelves to display prettier items and free up some
more cabinet space. Did I dare go
to IKEA alone and try to select, carry, then put together a shelf, while Chris
was in Boston? On top of all the
other items on my agenda for the day?

Oh, but this is
exactly the sort of thing I do. I even thought I would do it all, and
have time to go for a six-mile run, after which I’d luxuriously make green soup
for dinner and even bake some oatmeal raisin cookies to take to the office in
the morning. At the end of it all, I’d curl up on the sofa with Meeks, a new
book, and a glass of wine.

I thought I
would do all this, and maybe even more, on Sunday.

Obviously, I
did not get it all done, I did not sit down on the sofa for that glass of wine
until 12:00am, and my dinner was popcorn with Cholula hot sauce, not green soup;
there was no desert.

But after seven
back-and-forth trips to the car, I have all the things I need to cook to my heart’s
content for a long time, including a precious stockpile of homemade broth. And lots of sweat, plundering through
Chris’s tool boxes, and jimmy-rigging later, my shelf is pretty darn cute! Though some parts will have to be
brought back to IKEA and exchanged for the correct parts, and the shelves
themselves will probably benefit from actually being screwed into the frame.

large bodies of water, particularly the ocean, and everything that goes with it: the endless shades of blue and green and grey and white, the sounds of waves and seagulls, its expansiveness, its restorative nature.